| Clowns Gallery-Museum | |
| Location: | Holy Trinity Church, Dalston, England |
| Map Type: | United Kingdom London |
| Coordinates: | 51.5443°N -0.0731°W |
| Type: | Clowning museum |
| Director: | Mattie Faint (Mattie the Clown) |
The Clowns Gallery-Museum is a museum of clowning. Established in 1959, the collection contains costumes and props from famous clowns, as well as a reference library,[1] and is home to the Clown Egg Register.
The collection is split between the museum's two sites, the Holy Trinity Church, Dalston, and Wookey Hole, Somerset, England.[2] The museum was established in 1959 in Dalston and the collection was split into a venue in Wookey Hole in 2007. The Dalston museum is situated in what was the vestry of the Holy Trinity Church.[3] It was threatened with closure in 2014 but remained in place.[4] The Wookey Hole museum is run by Gerry Cottle, vice president of Clowns International.[5]
The Clown Egg Register is an archive of painted ceramic and hen's eggs that serve as a record of individual clowns' personal make-up designs.[6] The clown egg tradition began in 1946, when Stan Bult, a chemist, and founder of Clowns International, took to drawing the faces of club members and famous clowns onto chicken eggs.[7] The egg gallery was created to forestall the possibility of accidental or intentional plagiarism: an unofficial rule prohibits any two clowns from sharing a single face paint design, with eggs providing a suitably head-shaped mannequin. Real eggs were originally used but were later replaced with ceramic eggs. The gallery is open on the first Friday of each month.[6]